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When X>>Y>>Z, ideas kinda explode in revolutionary ways. When they don’t, all the money and top-down power in the world won’t make fetch happen
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A clear tell of a person with 100% interests, 0% curiosity is that they resent such outcomes and act like attention allocation is entirely a function of money and “ought” to be reallocated to favor their prefigured interests. A social determinist command economy mindset.
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The history of discovery is littered with command economies trying to make fetch happen by moving money around. It’s not entirely ineffective — it’s just a force that’s completely overwhelmed by intrinsic interestingness-generativity of new things in the world
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Trying to fight the natural interestingness patterns of what nature reveals, one piece at a time, (which has unfortunately come to be known as ‘what technology wants’) is a kind of deep hubris. Ironically, the accusations of hubris usually go the other way.
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It’s not that money doesn’t matter. It matters a LOT. It’s just that it has massively amplified effects when it follows the natural grain of interestingness revealed by open curiosity and efficiently wasted when it tries to follow “interests”
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I generally flip the bozobit on a person if they reach for the zero-sum complaint: “attention to X is detracting attention from Y” It means they’ve never stopped to ponder the attention dynamics of interests and curiosities, or even looked at the world without an agenda.
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Sure, it takes surplus attention, a kind of abundance born of privilege which may or may not be deserved, to be curious without a governing interest, but being mad at that and expecting scarcity to have the same effects as abundance is… weird.
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For better or worse, the world evolves when people get curious about something and decide to fuck around and find out what happens when you poke at it. And yes sometimes the people who fuck around aren’t the people who find out. But nobody has yet found a better way.
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This thread is both a long subtweet of a specific provocation, and thoughts on a repeated pattern of interests without curiosities that is kinda endemic in modernity. This pattern has a right to exist of course. You just have a right to ignore it and play in the curiosity economy
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Curiosity doesn’t preclude obsessiveness, in fact the two feeding on each other is what makes for generativity
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Replying to @vgr
on the other hand lots of things were discovered by obsessives. heliocentrism for instance. persistent obsessiveness resulting even in death.
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Replying to
Feed only your curiosities and your interests will often take care of themselves and you might even generate surpluses to look out for the interests of others who might lack the resources for curiosity But feed only your interests and you’ll starve both curiosities and interests
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Academia would get 10x more interesting in 5 years if they asked faculty candidates for statements of research curiosities rather than statements of research interests
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When you know both the likely valence and magnitude of the outcome of an uncertain action, you’re solving a problem When you know the valence but not the magnitude you’re pursuing an interest When you know neither, you’re pursuing a curiosity Archetypes: insect, dog, cat
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This train of thought are me realize why I think “bring your whole self to work” is bs. It is code for “bring all your established interests, leave your curiosities behind” because your curiosities are your incompletions; ways in which you are not whole
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If you have many curiosities, in the context of those curiosities, you’ll always look like an absurd cartoon. If you leave them out, you’ll look like a different sort of grim caricature, defined entirely by interests. A set of representations without an actual live presence.
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